Murder at the Art & Craft Fair by Steve Demaree

with women of all ages. I
noticed the crowd of women before I noticed whose booth it was, and what she
was selling. The name above the booth said Melissa Spaulding, Fairy Bow Mother,
Winchester, Kentucky.
    “Lou, did you have any idea that women buy that many
hair bows? Look at that! There are four women lined up just to give that woman
money.”
    “Wonder what they do with them?”
    Before I could give my shrug of an answer one woman
knelt down to place a bow on her dog, while a grandmother-type took the hand of
a little girl who was already wearing a hair bow. I could tell that some women
were buying several bows. Since it wasn’t a guy thing, I wasn’t sure if that
meant she was buying for several girls or that it would be a sin for a girl to
wear the same hair bow twice, or at least twice in a row.
    The crowd drawn by the Fairy Bow Mother almost kept me
from seeing the man next to her, another author, Tim Callahan, from Middletown,
Ohio. I sat there and watched Callahan operate in such a quiet manner. People
were gravitating toward him. I got up and walked over close enough to hear what
he was saying that enticed so many people to come over and to leave with an
armload of his books. I wondered if he was offering free books, or if someone
like George had paid for books for all these people. Instead, all he said was,
“Can I tell you about my books?” and then he went into a description of the
books he had for sale. Curious no longer, I went back to the bench and watched
him operate. Person after person left his tent with three to six books, signed
by the author. It was at that point I told Lou that we should skip the first
two booths. For one thing, neither of us needed any hair bows. And for another,
if no one else could resist Callahan’s salesmanship, I doubted if I could,
either. I couldn’t believe his voice, quiet, not boisterous. I wondered if
maybe he was able to hypnotize these people into buying those books. After all,
hypnotists don’t shout.
    I was still thinking about him when Jennifer and
Thelma Lou walked up. We talked for a few minutes, agreed that Lou and I would
take all of the purchases to the car, and that the four of us would visit
Booths 46-60 before taking a break for lunch.

 
    Chapter
Nine
     
     
    The trek to the car and back made me smile. No, I
wasn’t happy that I had to walk instead of ride on a Hoveround, but I knew that
in the olden days walking preceded Wiiing for shedding a few pounds. I was shedding
the old-fashioned way.
    We returned, and it didn’t take Lou and me long to
catch up with the girls. Jennifer and Thelma Lou had stopped in a colorful
booth. As I neared the booth, I looked up to see what all of that colorfulness
was. The sign said, Nell Demaree, Fobs, Purses, and Books. The books were being
sold by some old guy seated at a table, and from the looks of things, he hadn’t
done much else with his time except write. He had more different titles than
the other two authors we had encountered. If the woman taking the money was
Nell Demaree, and Nell Demaree was his wife, he didn’t waste all of his words
on his books. At some point he must have fed that good-looking woman a line to
get her to marry him. Of course, he probably looked better when he was younger.
    Jennifer had learned that Nell was known as the Fob
Queen, because at over four hundred choices she offered more fob possibilities
than any of the other women who made fobs. Jennifer was right. I saw fobs for
schools, animals of every kind, cartoon characters, fobs with every letter of
the alphabet, fobs that looked feminine, and fobs that looked masculine. And
Jennifer told me that sometimes a fob behind another was a different design
because there was only so much room in one booth. She was so busy showing me
all the fobs she was buying for every person she had ever met that I didn’t see
what dangled at the end of her other arm, until she sat the two bags down.
Then, I saw the bags, noticed their bright blue